Buskerud Kunstsenter i samarbeid med Kongsberg kunstforening presenterer filmprogrammet Unfolding Spaces – The Depths Below.

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Marte Aas

Eglè Budvytytè

HC Gilje

Emilija Škarnulytė

New Mineral Collective

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Filmprogrammet viser arbeider av seks kunstnere fra Norge, Litauen og Canada, og tar for seg forholdet mellom levende skapninger, naturen og intelligente økosystemer. Arbeidene kretser rundt artsmangfold, mikroorganismer og økosystemer, fra korallarter som lever dypt nede i havet, mennesker og dyr som samhandler med naturen, til lav som utfordrer ideen om individet og supplerer evolusjonsteorien.

Programmet er produsert og kuratert av Buskerud Kunstsenter, og vil bli vist på Buskerud Kunstsenter og i Kongsberg Kunstforening.

Marte Aas (b. 1966, Trondheim) is a photographer and film maker based in Oslo. Aas´ main area of interest is the intersection between contemporary image culture, history, technology and landscape. Her work attempts to address underlying structures and gestures that form political and ideological narratives. The different subjects of interest visualizes in the form of films, photographs and installations, folding them into non-linear and layered narratives. The starting point for her works is often a story present in contemporary or historical material, which is being processed through research into different formats and media, although strongly grounded in a photographic practice. Photography´s material aspects, the connection between the sign and the signifier and the representational value of photography is thus also investigated and processed in her art.

Aas is educated at The School of Photography at The University of Gothenburg and has had a number of exhibitions and screenings in Norway and abroad, her last major exhibition was Francine (was a machine) at Kunsthall Trondheim in 2019. Aas has published several books and catalogues including Marte Aas – Photography and Film, 2010, Torshovtoppen, 2008 and On the Subject of Body and Space, 2013 and is also one of the founding members of the publishing house Multipress.

Eglè Budvytytè (b. 1982, Lithuania). Lives and works in Vilnius and Amsterdam. A graduate in photography from the Vilnius Art Academy and in audio-visual studies from the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam, Eglė Budvytytė obtained a master’s degree at the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam in 2008. Her work has been presented at several art centers in Europe and elsewhere in the world, in particular the Museum de Arte Moderna in São Paulo, the CAC in Vilnius, the Swiss Institute in New York and the TENT in Rotterdam.

Her practice is defined through a variety of mediums, video, radio broadcast, or performance, and explores a certain relationship to the environment. Eglė Budvytytė questions the sensitivity and consciousness of what surrounds us through semi-constructed, semi-improvised situations, between fiction and reality, staged scenario and documentary. The artist dissolves the boundaries between the imaginary and the real in order to analyze the social construction of identity and its relationship to the real.

HC Gilje (b. 1969, Norway) has moved between installation, experimental video, live performance and set design since he graduated from the intermedia department of the Academy of Fine Arts in Trondheim in 1999. Early in his career he was a key figure in the live cinema scene from around 2000 (with 242.pilots and various other constellations). Gilje toured extensively throughout the world, while at the same time creating experimental videos presented at various film, art and festival venues. Gilje was also quite active in theater and dance, mainly through his many-year collaboration with choreographer Eva Cecilie Richardsen. Together they established Kreutzerkompani with a yearly production from 2000 to 2006.

From 2006 his focus has been to take elements from his earlier practice into a longer-term project he has called Conversations with Spaces. This project explores, mainly through large-scale installations, perception of change and transformation in the meeting between the ephemeral media of light, projection, sound and motion with physical structures. This has resulted in a series of installations labeled Projected Light Spaces and Projected Light Objects, as well as outdoor sound installations and more recently light-motion installations like in transit, revolver and trace. These projects have been shown in traditional gallery spaces, outdoors and in more unconventional settings.

Emilija Škarnulytė (b. 1987, Vilnius, Lithuania) is an artist and filmmaker. Working between documentary and the imaginary, Škarnulytė makes films and immersive installations exploring deep time and invisible structures, from the cosmic and geologic to the ecological and political. Her films are in the IFA, Kadist Foundation and Centre Pompidou collections and have been screened at the Serpentine Gallery, UK, Centre Pompidou, France, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York and in numerous film festivals including in Rotterdam, Busan, and Oberhausen. She is the winner of the 2019 Future Generation Art Prize, Škarnulytė represented Lithuania at the XXII Triennale di Milano and was included in the Baltic Pavilion at the 2018 Venice Biennale of Architecture, and her recent solo show was at Tate Modern. Most recently she concluded her tenures at Art Explora and Cite des Art, which occurred on the heels of another significant residency at the MAK Center for Art and Architecture.

She is a founder and currently co-directs Polar Film Lab, a collective for analogue film practice located in Tromsø, Norway and is a member of artist duo New Mineral Collective, recently commissioned for a new work by the First Toronto Biennial.

New Mineral Collective is a platform that looks at contemporary landscape politics to better understand the nature and extent of human interaction with the earth´s surface. As an organism, NMC infiltrates the extractive industry with alternative forces such as desire, body mining and acts of counter prospecting. Their work has been shown nationally and internationally, including SIART Bolivia International Art Biennial, Artists’ Film International Season 7, organized by Whitechapel Gallery; the first Toronto Art Biennial; SeMA Seoul Museum of Art; On Earth, Structure and Sadness, at Serpentine Galleries, UK; the Swedish Center for Architecture and Design, Stockholm; and most recently as part of Swimming Pool: Troubled Waters, currently on view at Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin. Since 2015, the artists Emilija Škarnulytė (born in Vilinus, Lithuania; lives in Tromsø, Norway) & Tanya Busse (born in Moncton, NB, Canada; lives in Tromsø, Norway) run NMC.

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